Bittersweet Passion

by Peggy Webb

  The angel’s voice lifted pure and rich down the hall, and Daniel realized he was hungry.

  “It’s no problem, Reverend. I take good care of my patients and their families. I want you to know that.”

  “We appreciate that. And please…call me Daniel.”

  She smiled again, that warm gold-toothed smile that brightened the room. “If you call me Vicky we’ll be all set here.”

  Beyond his room the voice sailed upward on a clear sustained note, then abruptly dropped back an octave to a deep intimate tone that made the hair rise on the back of Daniel’s neck.

  “It’s a deal,” he said.

  “All right then, I’ll leave you to your supper. It’s ham and greens. Good country cooking. We’ve got a good cook here.”

  The beautiful voice dropped even lower in a dark bluesy riff that had Daniel wondering why his collar was too tight and the room too hot.

  “Wait,” he said as Vicky headed toward the door. “Who is that singing?”

  “Oh, that. That’s Skylar, Skylar Tate. I’ll go tell her to stop if it’s bothering you.”

  “No, no, please. It’s…” Riveting. Mind-boggling. Miraculous. “…very nice.” He had to know more. “Is she a patient here?”

  Vicky laughed. “Lord, no. That girl’s got more energy than any three of us put together. Healthy as a horse. She just comes here when she’s in town to entertain our patients. They all seem to like it.”

  “No doubt.”

  “But now if she ever gets too loud for you, you just let me know. I’ll tell her to pipe down. I don’t know if she’ll do it, though.” Vicky laughed. “The last time I did that, way back last Easter I think, when that mean old Mr. Gumpus was still here, Skylar just laughed and said, ‘Vicky, you tell that old fuddy-duddy to go straight to hell’… Oh, excuse me, Reverend…I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  Daniel laughed. “The only thing that offends me is when people start treating me as if I’m not human like everyone else.”

  “Well, now, that’s a relief. No, more than that. It’s a pure-dee jubilee.”

  “What’s a jubilee, Vicky?”

  “It’s joy that just pops up out of nowhere, usually in the least likely of places.”

  “Sounds great. I’ll have to look for some.”

  “Oh, it won’t come if you go looking. You have to wait and let it come to you…’ night, Daniel.”

  “Goodnight.” She left, pulling the door closed behind her. “Oh, Vicky…would you mind leaving the door open?”

  She gave him a knowing grin. “Sure thing, Rev.”

  His dinner tray forgotten, Daniel gave himself over to the heavenly music. With the cessation of conversation and the door wide open he began to make out snatches of lyrics. A smile spread across his face that got bigger and bigger.

  Skylar Tate was singing about honky-tonks, wild wicked women and blues-struck men with empty whiskey glasses and empty beds.

  Drifting toward the door like a moth to a flame, Daniel revised his opinion about the singer. He pictured a fallen angel. With a crooked halo…and spike-heeled shoes.

  The door down the hall had opened and there she was. In stiletto heels. Red. A skirt so short it barely covered the subject. Black. A little scarlet sweater that left not much to the imagination and lush lips the color of ripe plums.

  He guessed he was staring. Skylar Tate stared right back, hip slung, one eyebrow arched. Long, long legs. The blackest hair he’d ever seen. Lots of it. Hair that inspired fantasies. Not the tame kind where he was running his hands through it, but the bawdy kind where he was watching her bent over him with her raven’s hair spreading across his thighs.

  A lazy satisfied cat’s smile spread across Skylar Tate’s face. As if she knew. As if she could read his mind.

  And why not? A woman such as that was bound to know the effect she had on men.

  And Daniel was all man. In spite of what some of his parishioners thought.

  Lord, if they knew what he was thinking right now the ladies of the altar guild would hold a prayer meeting for him. The organist would have a heart attack. The pastor/parish relations committee would run him out of Atlanta on a rail.

  The gorgeous fallen angel was still smiling at him with wicked glee. What was he supposed to say? To do?

  Lord, he’d been so wrapped up in his profession, so caught up in his father’s coma that he didn’t even remember what it was like to strike up a conversation with a pretty woman, let alone approach one.

  What would he say? “Hi, I’m the Reverend Westmoreland, and you inspire me to sin?”

  Suddenly Skylar Tate began to move. She was coming straight toward him. Her hips…Lord, have mercy. He’d never seen anything like it. The way she moved would make saints turn in their halos.

  She was closer now, so close he could see that her eyes were so blue they were almost purple. Would she stop when she got to his father’s room? Would she speak to him?

  His mouth got dry and his tongue felt glued to his throat. He was so hot he could feel his shirt sticking to him in damp patches.

  Now he could see the heart-shape of her lips. A tiny black mole just above the right side where they still curved upward. And suddenly he knew why they called it a beauty mark. Was it real?

  It had to be. Everything about her looked real. She wasn’t the kind of woman given to posturing. He could tell.

  He cleared his throat, mentally rehearsing what he was going to say when Skylar Tate drew even with the door, practicing the way he did with his Sunday sermons. Except this was no sermon he planned to deliver. Not by a long shot.

  He was thinking of something along the lines of, “Good evening.” Or perhaps, “Hello. How are you?” Brilliant repartee. Sure to bowl her over.

  She was almost here. He could smell her fragrance. Something warm and sweet and dark. Gardenias growing in a deep jungle.

  The sweat was now soaking his collar.

  Then all of a sudden she was standing right in front of him.

  “Hi, there.” Her voice was rich and throaty. Mesmerizing. Sexy. “You don’t look like a preacher.”

  How did she know that? Did it show? Did preachers wear some kind of label that was invisible to themselves but glowed like neon to beautiful women? Did fallen angels have special radar that detected men of the cloth the same way trained dogs sniffed out bombs?

  His tongue clove to the roof his mouth, and he was still trying to pry it off when Skylar Tate gave him one more wicked smile, then walked on down the hall.

  Still, Daniel hadn’t said a word. Not one.

  As embarrassed as if he were thirteen and had just been awakened by his first wet dream, he slid back into the shadows of his father’s room.

  And all he could think of was that the back of Skylar Tate looked just as good as the front of her.

  Chapter Two

  Skylar had rung like bells when she stopped in front of Daniel Westmoreland, and she was still tingling when she got to the parking lot. Her condition made her so mad she kicked her back tire, then she kicked it again, just for good measure.

  “Damn, damn, damn,” she said, then she added “Hell-fire,” on general principles.

  She wouldn’t touch a preacher with a ten-foot pole. Nosiree, bob. She wouldn’t touch one with a twenty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole. That’s what she’d always told herself. She’d grown up in that particular fishbowl, a preacher’s kid, wild, willful and rebellious, the talk of the town, the most spectacular failure of her father’s long and illustrious career.

  On her twenty-first birthday he’d called her up. She’d been out in Las Vegas at the time, bumming around, taking singing gigs wherever she could find them.

  “I’m in the business of saving souls, Skylar, and it pains me to know that I haven’t been able to save yours.”

  That’s what he’d said. Without preamble. Without even wishing her a happy birthday.

  “Do you know what day this is?” she’d asked, and he’d said, “Of course. You’re
an adult now. That’s why I’m so worried about you.”

  “Well, the next time just send a card, Daddy.”

  The year after that she’d been in Alaska backpacking with Rick Savory on her birthday, and the next year in Europe singing with the newly formed band, New Blues. The band had returned to America to a modest amount of acclaim and a new record contract that had booted them up the ladder a bit. And if they weren’t on the rungs of roaring success, at least they were close enough.

  One of Skylar’s biggest regrets was that her daddy hadn’t lived to see her perform. He’d have been mortified.

  Her parents had been killed in a car accident while she was in Europe, and nobody had told her until after the funeral. Maybe it was because they didn’t know where to find her, Reverend Wayne Tate’s black-sheep daughter. Or perhaps they hadn’t even tried. Perhaps they’d thought she’d be an embarrassment to the good Reverend Tate as he strolled through the Pearly Gates and looked back at his send-off.

  Skylar climbed into her ancient Thunderbird convertible and roared home with the top down, breaking the speed limits. She was still fuming when she turned into her parents’ driveway.

  Funny, that’s how she still thought of the little cottage she’d inherited, even after five years. Her parents’ house. And in a way she guessed it still was. She hadn’t changed anything, not even the faded drapes.

  Why bother? She was on the road most of the time anyhow. It was only a place to hang her hat between tours.

  Pussy Willow came to greet her, the cat she’d rescued from a back alley in Toronto four years earlier. She curled herself around Skylar’s ankles purring, but even that didn’t lift her from her blue funk.

  It was all Daniel Westmoreland’s fault. Why did he have to be a preacher?

  She picked her cat up and carried her to the sofa where she plopped down and kicked off her shoes.

  “I made a fool of myself today, Miss Pussy W.,” she said, and the cat batted at her hair. “You want to know? I thought so. Well, when I got to the nursing home today I saw this gorgeous man get out of his car…Georgia license plates, mind you, and I thought, hmmm, somebody new and interesting has come to town, somebody I can have fun with.

  “Well, I inquired of old battle-ax, you know that horse-faced nurse Schuster, and she told me who he was, told me all about him, in fact.”

  Pussy Willow sat up and waited with her tail switching.

  “Waiting for the punch line, are you? Well, I’m not going to keep you in suspense. He’s a preacher.”

  The cat sniffed her disdain, then leapt off Skylar’s lap.

  Skylar got up and padded barefoot to the stereo, put on a great Eric Clapton CD and began to dance. Transported by the music she unbuttoned her sweater and tossed it onto a high-backed chair. Next came her skirt. Then her black lace thong.

  It was only when Pussy Willow jumped onto the back of the sofa to watch a bird out the window that Skylar remembered to pull down the shades.

  “What the heck,” she told her cat, laughing. “Might as well give the neighbors a thrill. Some of them could use loosening up.”

  Daniel was lifting the cover off his dinner when he heard a familiar voice.

  “Yahoo, is anyone home?” His mother’s friend Clarice stuck her head around the door frame, and seeing him, grinned. “Daniel! Come here you old sweetpea.”

  She hugged him, then plopped an oversize purse on the floor and marched toward the bed like a brass band, bangle bracelets clanking, high-heeled boots clicking, the beads around her neck bouncing.

  “Hello, Michael, I’m here to bring a little fun into your life. The three of us are having a spend-the-night party tonight, just you and me and Anne. If I were you I’d get out of that bed so I could defend myself.”

  Daniel was delighted to learn she’d be spending the night, though he was not surprised. His mother’s friends were not merely cheerleaders when things were good but soldiers when things went bad.

  “I’m glad you’re staying tonight, Clarice. That’s very generous-hearted of you.”

  She settled into a chair, her full skirt billowing about her, a tiny, trim woman who was still gorgeous at fifty-six, which could account for her five husbands. That, plus her personality. She made you feel good just being around her.

  “Ha! I have ulterior motives. Have you seen the director here? Sexy as all get-out, even if he is slightly roly-poly…and speaking of sexy, have you met Skylar Tate yet?”

  Clarice knew practically everybody, and loved to tell what she knew. And Daniel was more than curious about Skylar Tate.

  “I saw her. Do you know her?”

  “She’s from Huntsville, a good old Alabama girl, grew up practically at my back door. She was always a wild little thing, climbing trees, skinning her knees, running off so she could hang around the honky-tonks listening to the music.”

  “She sounds full of spirit.”

  “Oh, she was, still is, though how that happened is a mystery to me. She was saddled with the worst set of godawful parents who ever drew a breath.”

  “Abusive?”

  If Clarice had said yes, Daniel was going to drive over to Huntsville and personally beat the hell out of them, he who had never wanted to lay a hand on anybody in his life.

  “No, just narrow-minded, anal-retentive bigots who never met a human being they thought worthy of love, even their own daughter. No wonder she ran away.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Sixteen the first time. They brought her back, but the second time she left—she was eighteen—they didn’t even try to bring her home. Then the Reverend Tate got transferred here, and I lost touch for a few years till I married Sam and moved here myself. You remember him? My fourth husband.”

  “Yes, I do. I always liked Sam.”

  What he really wanted to talk about was Skylar’s father, the minister. But Clarice was already reminiscing about Sam.

  “So did I. He had a wonderful smile, and one of the biggest…oh well, you don’t want to hear that. What you’re wanting to hear about is Skylar Tate.”

  “It shows, huh?”

  “Honey, any man who has ever met her wants to know more about her. She’s living right here in Vicksburg, at least when she’s not on the road.”

  “On the road?”

  “Performing. She’s the lead singer for the New Blues.”

  “That explains the voice. Unforgettable.”

  Anne walked in and conversation shifted away from Skylar, but Daniel couldn’t forget her. On the drive back to Belle Rose he decided to take a detour by the mall. He needed to pick up some shaving cream…and a book wouldn’t hurt, something to read during all those lonely hours sitting at the nursing home.

  But you’re going back to Atlanta tomorrow, aren’t you?

  That had been his plan, of course, but he hated to leave his mother the day after they put Michael into the nursing home. He’d call Quentin and ask him to cover one more day.

  Daniel was whistling when he walked into the mall, and the first thing he spotted was a music store. Why not? He walked the aisles, browsing through CDs with names that sounded like something you’d want to stamp out from the pulpit if you were that kind of minister. Thank God, he wasn’t.

  Finally he approached the pimply-faced young man at the front and asked, “Do you have anything by Skylar Tate?”

  “Oh, yeah. Man, she’s some hot chick. Have you seen her video?”

  “Video?”

  “Music video. Too Hot to Handle.”

  That’s how Daniel ended up back at Belle Rose with no shaving cream and no book, but six CDs and a music video of Skylar Tate.

  He slid the music video into the machine then leaned back against his headboard to watch. A single spotlight shone on a dark stage, then as a moaning blues riff filled the air, the spotlight brightened and there was Skylar Tate, head down, long black hair covering her face and her torso, nothing showing but a pair of tight tiny black shorts and long, long legs.

 
; She started to sing, then flipped her head back, and Daniel came up off the bed. At first he thought she was wearing nothing at all except shorts, and then he saw the glitter of sequins, a random string or two. It could hardly be called a top. Not even a bra. More like a set of pasties on strings.

  Riveted, he stood in front of the TV. And when it was over, he rewound the tape and watched the whole thing again.

  By the time it was finished he had to stand a while and compose himself before he could walk. Finally he went to the bathroom and splashed cold water over his face and neck. When that wasn’t enough, he jerked off his clothes and climbed into the shower. The water was so cold it stung.

  Daniel stayed until he could feel goose bumps all over himself, then he climbed into bed, turned off the light and lay there with his eyes wide open.

  The next morning Daniel woke up with the vague feeling of something amiss. He lay still listening to the birdsong outside his window, the familiar ticktock of the grandfather clock in the hallway and the comforting whirring of the ceiling fan above his bed.

  “All’s well,” he said, then climbed out of bed to shave. Using a bar of soap. He nicked himself on the chin and had to staunch the flow of blood with a piece of toilet paper.

  With the paper still sticking to his chin he walked out onto the balcony, gazed out over the garden and listened. Merely listened. A brisk breeze stirred the trees, and a squirrel making his way to the bird feeder hung on while the branch danced underneath him. Nearby two mockingbirds dive-bombed his head, scolding and flapping their wings.

  And above it all, the sun. Painting the morning skies.

  Daniel wasn’t on his knees, but he was praying. For the first time in weeks.

  He stayed on the balcony a while longer, and when he went inside he knew what he had to do. Picking up the phone he called Atlanta.

  Skylar didn’t usually go to the nursing home two days in a row. She also didn’t go early. Mornings she reserved for herself, for leisurely baths with lots of candles burning and scented oil poured into the water, for lazy breakfasts in the garden with her face turned up to the sun, the only music the sound of birds, for long walks in the little park down the street, for sitting on the porch swing reading a good book.